THOMAS TASCHINGER: Spoilers may decide presidential race

By Thomas Taschinger

Published 1:30 am, Sunday, September 9, 2012

If Mitt Romney loses in November, you can give the credit to Barack Obama. After all, he's the Democrat opposing the Republican. Then again, you might be able to give the credit (or blame) to a couple of guys you never heard of - like Virgil Goode and Gary Johnson.

Goode is the presidential nominee for the conservative Constitution Party. He's on the ballot in Virginia, and he's trying to do the same in several other states.

Johnson is the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate. He's on the ballot in all 50 states.

OK, you may be saying, so what? Both are fringe candidates who will be lucky to get 1 percent of the votes in any state. That's true - but that may be enough to keep Mitt out of the White House.

Notice I did not say Obama in that previous sentence. The reality of the Electoral College map is that Obama can lose a state or two that he planned on winning and still beat Romney. And both Goode and Johnson appeal to people who aren't going to vote for Obama anyway.

Romney, on the other hand, needs virtually every state he is counting on to get the magic number 270 electoral votes. If he loses a big state he was hoping for, like Ohio, it's definitely over for him. He simply falls short in the Electoral Collage.

Heck, even if he loses a small state like New Mexico with only four electoral votes, that might be enough to deny him the presidency.

Think of the states that George W. Bush carried in 2000 when he barely won. That is basically the template for a Romney victory.

Granted, Romney might catch fire and win by a big margin. But it's more likely that the race will remain close until November, with neither candidate pulling far ahead.

Clearly, under a scenario like this, spoilers like Virgil Goode or Gary Johnson could take away enough votes from Romney in key states - or just one state - to sink him.

Remember that Bush won Florida, and hence the presidency, by only 537 votes in 2000. If spoiler Ralph Nader hadn't siphoned away Democratic-leaning voters from Al Gore in Florida and other states, Al was in.

It was almost a payback for the election in 1992, when spoiler Ross Perot probably took away enough votes from the first President Bush to let Bill Clinton win.

That history shows why Democrats and Republicans dislike spoilers, but it's a challenge they have to live with. In our democracy, any party or candidate can usually get on the ballot if they turn in enough signatures. That's fair, even if they have little chance of winning.

Winners simply man up and do whatever it takes despite spoilers, the weather, bad luck, etc. A forgotten fact from the 2000 election is that Bush also could have lost some votes to conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, who ran under the banner of Perot's old Reform Party.

Either because conservative voters didn't like Buchanan or did like Bush, that didn't happen - in the same election where Nader nailed Gore.

Romney needs to keep that in mind this year. He will win or lose on his merits, as it should be. If he doesn't want to lose votes to spoilers like Goode or Johnson, he needs to give voters enough reasons to make sure that doesn't happen.

--------------------------------------------

Thomas Taschinger, TTaschinger@BeaumontEnterprise.com, is the editorial page editor of The Beaumont Enterprise. Follow him on Twitter at @PoliticalTom